The Release

Thunk. Thunk. Lucy jumped. Someone was pushing against the door and sliding her carefully positioned tables forward. The flag came unfettered from the tape and drifted downward and an angry face from one of the school’s security guards peered through the glass, his eyes darting around the room—landing on the television before finally locking on Lucy. She dropped off the desk and rushed to the window, throwing wide the curtain, before realizing that these windows would never grant her an escape. But her eyes caught a glimpse of the world outside for one brief moment. It was long enough to see a tower of smoke billowing into the sky, and even the clouds looked yellow and green and hazy. This vantage point had her looking across the football field where a storm of people gathered huddled in masses, their tiny bodies approaching the school like a death-march.

The security guard gained access to the room and he placed a hand on her shoulder and pulled her toward him. She stumbled into his grasp and felt her hopes of reuniting with her brother slipping away from her.

On the screen, images from around the nation and around the world surfaced in a slideshow. Nurses in biohazard gear treating the sick, a man slumped over a steering wheel in the middle of traffic, the wreckage of a downed plane, and a young mother carrying a small bundle out of her house, agony written on every angle of her face.

Lucy looked away.

How had so much happened in such a short amount of time?

The man caught a glimpse of the TV too, and his face collapsed a bit, softening in all the right places, before he toughened himself, shook the image from his mind, and tightened his hold on her. “All students in the auditorium. We’re in lockdown,” he stated.

“I just got here,” Lucy said.

“School is secure. Has been since ten minutes into first period. So, no way, darlin’. Come on,” he pushed her forward, pulling a walkie-talkie from his waistband. “McGuire here. Got a hider in Havs old room.”

It took a moment before someone radioed back. “Is she symptomatic?”

The guard looked her over. His finger rested on the button. “You feel sick?” he asked Lucy. “Feverish? Nauseated?”

She contemplated a snide reply, but then thought better of it. She shook her head.

“If you start to feel achy or if you start to get a headache or blurred vision,” he continued rattling off a list of ailments associated with the flu, while Lucy dropped her eyes to the floor. He led her into the hallway, maneuvering past the fallen, “You tell someone immediately. Understand?”

“Are people contagious?” she asked when he was done instructing her about what to expect upon entering the school’s self-imposed quarantine. She stepped in something wet and slimy; she refused to look down and tried to drag her soiled shoe along the floor to wipe it clean.

The guard shrugged.

Together they walked past a small alcove and Lucy turned her head. The doors and windows leading to the outside were covered in long strips of bulletin board paper. The guard followed her gaze.

“It’s part of the lockout procedures,” he offered. “Cover all windows and doors.”

“The news said that schools were a sanctuary,” Lucy said. Aware of her own impertinence, she blushed.

“Not this one.”

She felt tightness in her legs, and she kept her head low, looking at the ground. The guard’s walkie-talkie came to life with a booming distinct voice, a man she recognized as Friendly Kent, a tall man, with extreme biceps and a closet full of V-necked sweaters. He was the administrator in charge of student discipline, but his nickname was derived from the fact that Kent couldn’t, and didn’t, really enforce anything—excuses and sob-stories were laid at his feet and Kent ate them up greedily, walking students back to the same class they were just kicked out of and telling frustrated teachers to “give the kid a break.”

“Pablo Vasquez was hiding in the staff lounge,” Friendly Kent crackled through.

“Not a chance. Checked it twice,” Lucy’s guard answered.

“In the ceiling,” was Kent’s reply. “Fell through a piece of sheetrock tile trying to move himself to the edge.”

Lucy’s guard chuckled. The sound of his small amusement at a student’s legitimate fear and panic was grotesque to her.

They approached the cafeteria and she noticed all the lights were off and the long windows along the courtyard were also covered out and blackened. The second-period bell rang out into the empty hallways. It was a sound that normally signified chaos and excitement, inciting masses of students scurrying from one end of the school to another with sounds, squeals, yells, and shoes hitting the floor with clacks and squeaks. But now there was nothing. No laughter, no eagerness. No sounds but the two of them walking down the hall in isolation.

Lucy followed in silence past another row of covered windows. Shadows approached the paper and moved carefully along the outside wall like rows of zombies in old horror movies, sniffing and nudging for a way inside, aware of the warm bodies within. Lucy wanted to rush to the paper and pull it free, but the guard edged his way between her and the windows, as if he read her mind.

They rounded the corner past the gym and finally, after opening and closing two sets of double doors, closed upon the auditorium.

Friendly Kent came into view, escorting a sullen Pablo Vasquez, who was covered from head to toe in chalky sheetrock, and he reached the doors to the auditorium before them. He swung them open and sounds and smells poured outward—a roar of energy, hushed, intense—with voices lifting in anger and worry.

And then the meaty aroma of teenage stink burped toward them. Lucy turned her head away. She could almost taste the hormones and the racing fear. Then the doors crashed closed and everything was gone. It was like the opening of Pandora’s Box: Allowing the evils of that room to tease them for a moment before being contained back inside.

Lucy took a step backward, unaware that she was shaking her head.

Her guard pushed her forward, her feet tripping slightly on the outdated red and blue checkered carpet.

“Go in here. Find a place to sit. Don’t be a problem,” he commanded, switching tactics and grabbing her hand.

Lucy stole her hand back and shook her shoulders away from him as he reached back toward her shifting body. “Please don’t touch me,” she whispered. In her own mind, she had made the command with power and aggression—her words dripped with the vitriol rising within her. But instead she had sounded meek and unsure. “I’ll go in by myself,” she added, hoping to ease the temper she saw flare up in the guard’s eyes—a flash that dared her to run, dared her to defy him.

She reached forward and grabbed the door, the smell and the sound bursting forth a second time. And with a deep breath she walked into the darkened auditorium. Even with the lights on full-blast, the whole room was dim and the corners and walls lined with shadows. The stage was in a state of half-construction for the play Into the Woods. The pieces of buildings were flat on the floor while a mural of a dark forest with black twisty trees rising up to a yellow moon was nearly complete. The trees kept reaching backward into a dark unknown. Lucy resisted the urge to climb up on the stage and crawl her way into that forest. Even though it was black and uninviting and full of the unknown, it seemed safer than being forced to congregate with her peers.

All around her, people gathered in various levels of distress. Many students sat, staring straight ahead in the stadium seating with phones lighting up their faces. Another group sat huddled in a semi-circle, hugging and crying into each other. Lucy watched a girl with a long streak of red in her hair stroke the head of a boy bawling in her lap; she shushed him and rocked back and forth, her eyes closed tight.